Abstract
This article focuses on two iconic architectural works that dominate the ongoing intellectual discourse on conserving our recent past — the City of Chandigarh in India designed by Le Corbusier, and the Village of New Gourna in Egypt designed by Hassan Fathy. By examining the differential between their originating visions and their legacies that were shaped over more than five decades through many unforeseen circumstances and unaccounted consequences, this article provokes deeper reflections on our modern heritage and on the forces and entities that should decide its future.

Keywords
Modern Movement, Modern architecture, High density architecture, Urban growth, Modern urban planning, Chandigarh modern architecture, Le Corbusier, New Gourna modern architecture, Hassan Fathy.

Issue 50
Year 2014
Pages 72-79
DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.52200/50.A.N0LHBQHC

Abstract
Cities in the sky, superhighways over the seas, floating layers of techno-villages. These utopic proposals for Japan were generated by a passionate and extraordinary group of young Japanese architects fueled by the futuristic vision to rebuild their nation. Parallel to their idealism, was the path of Peter Land, an Englishman by way of Yale and South America, tasked to plan housing for the poor. Incredibly, their idealism would cross and the Metabolists’ first and only project would be for a United Nations social housing development in a place very far from Japan: Peru. Eui-Sung Yi sat down with the group’s last living member, Fumihiko Maki, and the organizer of the project, Peter Land, to discuss this project and its place in modern urban design (read the interviews in pg. 65 and 68, respectively).

Keywords
Modern Movement, Modern architecture, High density architecture, Urban growth, Modern urban planning, Ideal city, Metabolism, PREVI, Peruan modern architecture.

Issue 50
Year 2014
Pages 58-71
DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.52200/50.A.I679BS7M

Abstract
To find multiple possibilities and to create livable spaces in an extremely dense condition – that is what Japanese contemporary architects are particularly good at. Most of Japanese architects start their career by designing small houses in an urban environment; it is a good exercise for young architects to develop their design skills. The mini site and chaotic surroundings are far from an ideal condition; in fact it is a poor environment. But the architects come to learn that from this disadvantaged condition they can do something innovative.

Keywords
Modern Movement, Modern architecture, High density architecture, Urban growth, Modern urban planning, Flexible architecture, Japanese modern architecture, Metabolism.

Issue 50
Year 2014
Pages 52-57
DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.52200/50.A.L6KSWQ4E

Abstract
In the Asian mini-city-states of Hong Kong and Singapore, massive public housing programmes, far more extreme in density and height than their European and North American predecessors, have played an unexpectedly prominent role in development policy since the 1950s. This article explores some of the ways in which the original conventions of public housing were transformed and “densified” in these territories, and argues that the key influences in this process were not so much avant-garde modernist architectural discourses as the organisational mechanisms and political pressures within late British colonialism and decolonisation.

Keywords
Modern Movement, Modern architecture, High density architecture, Urban growth, Modern urban planning, Large-scale public housing, Hong Kong modern architecture, Singapore modern architecture.

Issue 50
Year 2014
Pages 44-51
DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.52200/50.A.2TTL4OUX

Abstract
São Paulo started the 20th century as a 240 thousand inhabitant town and concluded it as a 10 million inhabitant center of a metropolitan zone of 17,8 million inhabitants. The congestion and disorder disguise the planning efforts conceived since the first decade, but only partially implemented. This article highlights some of the most important urban planning proposals as the Avenue Plan (1930), the Robert Moses’s Plano de Melhoramentos (1950), the Basic Urbanization Plan (PUB, 1969) and the last Review of the Master Plan (2013-14) to São Paulo, and the challenges resulted of the pace of demographic and urban growth in that century.

Keywords
Modern Movement, Modern architecture, High density architecture, Urban growth, Modern urban planning, São Paulo modern architecture.

Issue 50
Year 2014
Pages 36-43
DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.52200/50.A.3EH7PMUY

Abstract
China’s massive capital accumulation, economic ascent and wealth production has largely been the result of their rapid urbanization effort. While it is indisputable that the country has largely succeeded in its economic reform efforts given its status as the world’s second largest economy and in that process lifted hundreds of millions of its population out of poverty, it has also, in that process, created severe social inequality and friction. This essay largely argues that Chinese cities are purpose-built financial instruments for capital accumulation, a result of the forces of globalization which could only have happened in sync with the time and space of a global economy. Though highly successful, so far the process has marginalized the objective of social integration into its performative matrix indexing. In this regard China has pursued an exploitive model of market driven urbanization and the resultant morphological and spatial attributes of the Chinese cities, while having achieved spectacular results on many levels, are nevertheless disjunctive. They are commodities of generic sameness that are mass-produced and exhibit the same anesthetizing effects of the spectacle that are ever prevalent in today’s global market production process, product and place. Recognizing that globalization and capitalism are here to stay in the immediate future, it begs the question if China, while having already undertaken extreme economic reform experimentations allowing it to now bask in its temporal success, will be able to leverage its acquired market knowledge and wealth creation to prospectively overcome the incredibly complex challenge of creating equitable cities in the future — ones that balance the demands of capital production on the one hand and social equity on the other — or rather will it sink deeper into the “neoliberal modern society” that it has already become.

Keywords
Modern Movement, Modern architecture, High density architecture, Urban growth, Modern urban planning, Chinese modern cities, Market-driven urbanization.

Issue 50
Year 2014
Pages 28-35
DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.52200/50.A.P1MVWPP2